Mobile devices have become more and more popular in recent years, especially thanks to the widespread diffusion of smart-phones and tablets. The mobile devices make many data processing activities substantially ubiquitous, since they may be used almost everywhere; particularly, users of these mobile devices may access the Internet while around (provided that an access thereto is available, for example, over a mobile telephone connection or a Wi-Fi connection).
The mobile devices may also cooperate among themselves locally, in a peer-to-peer way. For example, US-A-2010/0274614 (the entire disclosure of which is herein incorporated by reference) describes an event scheduling system that is implemented among mobile devices. Moreover, US-A-2005/0220045 (the entire disclosure of which is herein incorporated by reference) describes an instant messaging system wherein the mobile devices exchange instant messages directly, without any back-end messaging server.
Moreover, the mobile devices may be subject to typical actions that normally involve conventional (data processing) devices—such as desktop computers. For example, US-A-2011/0055546 (the entire disclosure of which is herein incorporated by reference) describes a monitoring system that controls available features on the mobile devices.
Particularly, nowadays the mobile devices have a processing power comparable to the one of the conventional devices. Therefore, many mobile devices are provided with a mobile operating system (such as Android by Google Inc., Symbian OS by Nokia Corp., Windows Mobile OS by Microsoft Corp. or iOS by Apple Inc.—trademarks), which combine the features of traditional operating systems with additional features specific for the mobile devices (such as cellular, GPS, and video-camera features). Moreover, the mobile devices may run a large number of software applications on top of their mobile operating systems, such as utilities (like a browser or a media player) and application programs, or apps (like a word-processor or a spread-sheet).
However, this involves the need to cope with typical management activities of the traditional devices—for example, installing, removing, upgrading and maintaining software programs (i.e., operating system and application programs), implementing security rules, and the like. This need is particularly perceived in case of mobile devices belonging to an enterprise, which requires consistent management of all its mobile devices.
For this purpose, conventional resource management tools might be used to manage the mobile devices as well—such as the IBM Tivoli Configuration Manager (ITCM) by IBM Corp. (trademarks). These resource management tools allow enforcing desired management actions on multiple endpoints (i.e., conventional devices or mobile devices) from a central management server. The resource management tools are generally based on an ad-hoc deployment infrastructure that optimizes the deployment of the required management data on the different endpoints (for example, with relays for distributing it and depots for caching it in proximity of the endpoints). Moreover, US-A-2008/0086731 (the entire disclosure of which is herein incorporated by reference) describes a resource management system, wherein data processing resources available in a data center are managed dynamically to maintain expected service levels (according to performance measurements used to predict demand levels).
However, the application of the above mentioned techniques designed for the conventional devices to the mobile devices raises specific problems. Particularly, the number of mobile devices to be managed (for example, in an enterprise) is generally very high. This causes scalability issues in the resource management tools, since the number of mobile devices to be managed may be 1 or 2 orders of magnitude larger than the one for which the management tools have been designed (generally at most 100,000 today).
Moreover, the nomadic behavior of the mobile devices makes it very difficult to organize an efficient deployment infrastructure (since the position of the mobile devices is changing continuously and it is substantially unpredictable).